About a decade ago, I moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C., that seemed like a bargain. The unit was in good shape and in a nice location. The price was reasonable—slightly below market rate, but not suspiciously low for a fourth-floor walkup. I did a brief walkthrough before signing the lease, just in case, only to cut it short when my editor at the time called to let me know that the Brexit vote was looking closer than expected.
Only after I moved in and tried to fall asleep on the first night did I realize why I was able to rent the place so easily: It was a few blocks down the street from a fire station, and the trucks passed under my window whenever they responded to a call. It took me about a month—a painful, exhausting, bleary-eyed month—to get used to it. Now I can sleep through almost anything.
I think about that fire station whenever I stumble across one of President Donald Trump’s social-media posts during his second term. Gone are the days when his 140-character remarks on Twitter would shape the news cycle in the late 2010s. Now it is easier to tune out the long jeremiads that he cranks out on Truth Social, which also might be the least readable social-media website in Internet history.
Trump’s social-media rants these days are so frequent and so voluminous that it is rarely worth paying them any specific attention to them. But his Mother’s Day post about the Supreme Court is a notable exception. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of his view of the Supreme Court—and how he expects personal loyalty from the justices that he appoints to it.
In the lengthy post, Trump criticized two members of the high court for voting in Trump v. Learning Resources, the case that nixed his purported ability to impose hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War-era emergency-powers law. The Supreme Court held 6-3 that Trump had exceeded the powers laid out in the statute.
“I ‘Love’ Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move,” Trump wrote. “How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!”
It would be hard to find a better example than this of Trump’s thinking that the justices that he nominated to the high court should be personally loyal to him. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his third appointee to date, was among the dissenters. There were six justices in the Learning Resources majority; four of them did not warrant a mention here. Trump did not even bother to criticize Chief Justice John Roberts, who actually wrote the opinion.
Naturally, that partial silence was not out of respect for the court. Trump obviously does not hold the three liberal justices in high regard. Last month, for example, he described Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “low IQ,” an insult that he typically reserves for Black lawmakers and officials, in another social media post. Chief Justice John Roberts has also been frequently criticized by Trump in the past, but received a less harsh treatment after his rulings for Trump in the disqualification case and the immunity case.
Instead, Trump focused on the two justices he appointed who ruled against him. “I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people,” he continued. “What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”
Two things stand out here. One is that Trump implicitly admits that, by siding with him, Gorsuch and Barrett would not be doing “the right thing.” So deeply ingrained in American culture is judicial independence that even Trump himself, the arch-heretic of American civil republicanism, must acknowledge it. The other is that Trump drops the pretense and explicitly demands loyalty from them.
Trump’s demands for personal loyalty are no surprise ten years after his first rise to power. The Russia investigation, which consumed the first half of Trump’s first term, exploded into public view after Trump demanded personal loyalty from then-FBI Director James Comey and then fired him after he didn’t receive it. So highly does Trump prize loyalty that he has packed his second-term Cabinet and key federal agencies with loyalists who often place his personal whims above ethics, the public interest, and the law itself.
But it is still striking to see him demand it from Supreme Court justices—and, by extension, from a co-equal branch of government—simply because he appointed them. If this is his public thinking about the justices, it casts doubt on whether any second-term Trump appointee can be trusted to place the national interest or the law ahead of Trump’s personal and political goals.
Kevin Warsh, who is currently awaiting a Senate confirmation vote to be the next Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers last month that he would “take [his] responsibility to be an independent leader of the Federal Reserve very seriously” and assured them that Trump had never “asked [him] to predetermine, commit, fix, [or] decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions, nor would I ever agree to do so.”
That under-oath answer would be more reassuring if Trump hadn’t spent the last year waging a war against Fed independence and specifically demanding that interest rates be set to his liking, at his whim. His administration has launched pretextual investigations into both Jerome Powell, the outgoing Fed chair, and governor Lisa Cook. Trump tried to fire Cook from the Fed last summer despite statutory for-cause removal protections; the Supreme Court blocked her removal pending its decision on the merits later this term.
Trump desperately wants the Fed to lower interest rates to help boost his chances in this year’s midterm elections. He wants it so badly that he has tried to destroy the Fed’s independence—a load-bearing pillar of American monetary hegemony—just to achieve it. Now his nominee is asking Americans to believe that Trump does not want personal loyalty from him—even as he demands of Supreme Court nominees who are unambiguously independent from him.
If Trump is willing to demand personal loyalty from Supreme Court justices, what about his lower-court nominees? Senate Democrats have asked Trump nominees for federal judgeships whether they believe Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. On multiple occasions, they have merely responded that Biden was “certified” as the winner—an evasive response that flatters Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election, defies the will of the American people, and suggests a lack of independent judgment.
“Democrat Justices always remain true to the people that honored them for that very special Nomination,” Trump continued in his Truth Social post. They don’t waver, no matter how good or bad a case may be, but Republican Justices often go out of their way to oppose me, because they want to show how ‘independent’ or, ‘above it all,’ they are.”
This would surely be news to Democratic presidents. Both of Obama’s confirmed Supreme Court nominees voted against him in a 2014 case on his recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Justice Elena Kagan sided with the court’s conservatives on blocking Medicaid expansion requirements in the landmark 2012 case on the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. I have personally never looked at the three current liberal justices in quite the same way since they voted to overturn Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado presidential ballot two years ago in Trump v. Anderson.
I’m sure that the Supreme Court’s liberals would vote against Democratic presidents more frequently if the Supreme Court had a liberal majority. More daylight would inevitably emerge if those justices were frequently asked to constrain adventurous efforts to stretch law and precedent by liberal legal activists and Democratic presidents. But this is a conservative Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority, so those opportunities are few and far between.
If anything, Trump should be thrilled with his treatment by the Supreme Court these days. During his first term, the court was much more willing to constrain Trump in key cases—keeping DACA on the books, blocking a citizenship question for the 2020 Census, allowing a New York grand jury to subpoena his financial records from his accountant, and so on. Back then, I noted, he seemed to assume that the court was closely aligned with him even when it very clearly wasn’t.
Now the reverse is true: the Supreme Court has given him nearly everything that he has wanted over the last two years—and he still isn’t satisfied. This is the same Supreme Court that just boosted his party’s midterm chances earlier this month by demolishing what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. He should be thanking Gorsuch, Barrett, and the other conservative justices for saving his political career in 2024. Had they and their colleagues simply upheld the Constitution that year, Trump would have been barred from running for a second term and instead stood trial for his crimes. Every public and private act he has taken since then stems from those fateful decisions.
From there, Trump once again recounted the scope of his 2024 electoral victory—which was middling at best—and expressed dismay that the court would likely soon strike down his birthright-citizenship executive order. It is unclear whether he has any personal insight into the court’s decision-making. Leaks from the high court are increasingly common these days, and past presidents have occasionally received a clandestine heads-up about key rulings from friendly justices.
Either way, Trump said his prediction was “based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session,” which is a fair assessment of how the Trump v. Barbara oral arguments went. Trump’s attendance, he complained, “was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court — Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!”
“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” he continued, in what can be interpreted as either a prediction, a threat, or an act of desperation. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”
One does not need a high opinion of the conservative justices to think this reasoning won’t work, at least not on some of them. Beyond the extralegal plea for “common sense” as the basis for immorally denaturalizing millions of Americans, the United States has also had birthright citizenship for the last 150 years. It could hardly be “economically [un]sustainable” if this country also became a global superpower in that timespan.
What Trump’s rant does underscore is how he thinks about the court and its place in American society—not as a neutral arbiter of constitutional law, but as a Pez dispenser to give him easy wins. In fairness to Trump, the court failed to disabuse him of his notion when it defied the Constitution on his behalf in 2024. But even these justices appear to have some limits—at least for now—as shown by the tariffs ruling that he despises.
This rhetoric must also be held against any nominee he puts forward in a role that requires any sort of institutional neutrality, whether at the Federal Reserve or a federal district court somewhere in Florida or Texas. The president has made clear once again that he expects reciprocal favor from anyone he installs in a high government position. This is not a new siren blaring across our political landscape, but Americans cannot afford to sleep through it.
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